Movies again!

Netflix means that I have a constant stream of movies coming in and out of my house...some are good, some are great, and some are just awful...

Speaking of just awful movies, Nacho Libre takes the cake for the worst movie I've seen in a long while. My husband and I started watching it, sat through 15 minutes, and couldn't handle it anymore. If you're idea of a good time is watching Jack Black do a bad Mexican accent and give a lot of intended-to-be-significant glances at things, this movie is for you. But if you're someone who needs a plot, interesting characters, and a movie that moves faster than a snail's pace, you should look elsewhere. Maybe I missed out by not seeing it through to the end, but I doubt it.

Rating: 0 stars out of 5

Syriana is a movie about oil, big business, and world economies. Several story lines twine together throughout the movie, detailing different aspects of the oil story--a young Pakistani worker, a CIA operative, an emir and his two sons who both want to be his heir, a financial analyst, a lawyer investigating an oil company merger. I enjoy this sort of structure in movies--I like seeing how stories that initially don't seem to connect come together in the end. Syriana was less fulfilling than other movies with a similar structure because everything didn't come together in the end. But that was the point of the movie--the lack of a definitive conclusion, and the confusion of what exactly was going on, did a great job of showing how complex the issues were, and how none of the players involved really knew everything that going on either. I thought the way the sound was done was very effective--there was a marked lack of background noise, which added a level of seriousness and made the silent moments even deeper. Overall, it was interesting and very well done, but required too much focus for me to easily enjoy it.

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

I remember seeing The Red Violin a few years ago, and I think I liked it then. Rewatching it, I wasn't quite as impressed as I remember. The movie tells the story of this one violin and shows several 20-minute segments on each of its owners. You have the brilliant kid, the sex-crazed virtuoso, the Chinese woman living under Mao. Each of these stories is interesting, but you don't ever get to know any of the characters well enough to really care about them. I do think the structure is cool, though. There's a lot of jumping back and forth, and it quickly becomes clear that this movie is the story of the violin, more than any one character. But while that's a cool concept, it's hard to really feel emotional about the way all of the characters seem to. The last half hour of the movie shows a present-day auction for the violin, with Samuel L. Jackson as an assessor for an auction house. He figures out that this violin is the historical "Red Violin," as well as what makes the varnish red. This part of the movie was much less interesting to me, and I thought that the ending was questionable in its believability.

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

If you're looking for a feel-good sports movie, Invincible is not it. This movie tells the story about the Philadelphia Eagles in the 70s, when coach Dick Vermeil held an open tryout to inspire interest in the lousy team. Mark Wahlberg plays Vince Papale, the only guy to make it onto the team through these tryouts. The story is predictable without being heartwarming--you just don't care about the characters. Greg Kinnear does a decent job as Vermeil, but Mark Wahlberg just doesn't seem to have the acting chops to make us feel anything for his character. Vermeil keeps talking about how Papale's the kind of guy who's the soul of a team, but you just never see that sort of passion in him. The other big problem is that Wahlberg is not the right size for a football player. Yeah, we see that he has muscles, but he's just too small. Every time he goes to block anyone, you wonder how it's possible. The cinematography is cool--all the scenes in south Philly are shot in darker sepia tones, while the NFL scenes are in blinding light and color. Pretty cool, but not enough to save the movie.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5